Lighting systems are well known in the art and can be effective means of advertising or decorating information or creating artistic displays. Conventional lighting and advertising systems including, but not limited to, digital billboards and wallscapes may not be installed without causing damage to a structure where they are installed. These conventional lighting systems can be an investment that may not provide a return on the investment and can be expensive to install and maintain. Poor weather conditions can damage conventional lighting systems, and limited size can make it difficult to see images and/or video from a distance. Distortion of building architecture can negatively impact a city's skyline or scene and may not be suitable for preserving a historical building when using conventional lighting systems. Accordingly, conventional lighting systems can provide several shortcomings.
Currently, LED video-display boards have similar but proprietary architectures using LED video bricks of different color pixel sizes. The video bricks can be put next to each other to assemble a video wall of a few meters in size on each side (FIG. 1). LEDs and their drivers are mounted close to each other on different printed circuit boards (PCBs) inside of each video brick. LED-driver PCBs also include a field programmable gate array (FPGA) and video-buffer memory chips.
For a video wall, interconnections between video bricks are normally made using coaxial cables. The video wall is then linked to control and video processing units by optical fiber. The control unit is used to configure these video bricks and select the proper video source. The video processor receives the selected video signal, converts its format, and sends the correct data information to the corresponding pixel position. The video processor also may perform data buffering and scaling.
One of the problems commonly associated with the system in FIG. 1 on building structures is that each room and each floor must be perforated for a wired cable to achieve data connection. Another problem is that the displayed area is limited by the attenuation of the connecting cable (i.e., the distance is large, the signal attenuation causes the display pattern to be out of sync or not displayed). The main controller and sub-processing controllers must be connected by cable wire to form an image/video. After the position of the main controller is determined, it cannot be arbitrarily changed to other controllers. Each sub-controller accepts all display content (large amount of data) to transmit and display each element picture of an image. The sub-controller can only transmit data sequentially but cannot implement data forwarding function like the router.